The album art for 4:44 is the work of designer Brian Roettinger and art director Willo Perron—the duo behind the creative for 2013’s “Magna Carta Holy Grail,” which resulted in Roettinger's second Grammy nomination. The solution here is close in spirit, but further stripped down. It lacks the photography and embellishments of MCHG and his No Age cover.

There's an unexpected typeface: Radim Peško's Larish Neue, an offshoot of his 2006 Plinius revival developed for the Secession art space in Vienna. And this sits on an unexpected background: a soft color between sand and peach that seems worlds away from the dour, macho palettes of most rap design.

From New Directions:

Resonant of nineteenth-century village tales and of such authors as Adalbert Stifter and her contemporary Robert Walser, the stories in The Country Road are largely set in the Swiss countryside. In these tales, the archaic and the modern collide.

The cleaving of Cynthia Hollandsworth’s and Arthur Baker’s typeface only adds to the dueling quality of this “sans serif with serifs”—which accords nicely with the publisher’s observation of cultural and temporal collisions.